Aquinas on Human Self-knowledge by Therese Scarpelli Cory (review)

Self-knowledge is sometimes regarded as a modern philosophical problem about which the medievals have “nothing interesting to say” (215). Moreover, even medievalists often assume that self-knowledge is only an “insignificant appendage to [Aquinas’s] account of cognition” (4). In response, Therese Cory aims to show that Aquinas developed a novel approach to self-knowledge and that the result is a “strikingly sophisticated theory” (3). More ambitiously, Cory argues that self-knowledge is “central to Aquinas’s conception of human cognition and personhood” (7). While she offers a strong case for the first two claims, the last requires a further study in which its full implications can be considered.

Cory divides her study into two parts, devoted to the historical and philosophical claims respectively. The first chapter challenges the interpretation that Aquinas adopts Aristotle’s abstractive approach to self-knowledge at the expense of Augustine’s intuitive theory. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s thesis that our self-cognition depends on knowing extramental things becomes the “central claim” (63) in Aquinas’s thought about self-knowledge. Chapter 2 tracks three phases of maturation of Aquinas’s views: from distinguishing between self-awareness (knowing that the soul is) and quidditative self-knowledge (knowing what the soul is), to identifying four distinct types of self-knowledge, to finally unifying Aristotelian and Neoplatonic approaches to self-knowledge in the “single insight that the intellect cognizes itself by its own actualized being” (53).

The second part explores interpretive problems that beset the four types of self-knowledge (chapters 3–7). These chapters are organized around interpretations Cory finds inadequate, to which she supplies a more complete analysis and resolution. Chapters 3 and 4 concern the content and the mode of self-awareness, respectively. Cory characterizes self-awareness as “intuitive,” notwithstanding that the term suggests that the soul knows itself directly through its essence—which Aquinas rejects. She astutely challenges the problematic assumption that the act of self-awareness mediates between myself and my cognition. She argues that first-person cognition presupposes “some sort of irreducibly direct self-access” (101). Where we tend to assume that acts and agents are separable, for the medievals acts are not proxies for the agent, but rather “modifications of the agent-substance” (102). Thus for Aquinas there is no bare self that can be perceived apart from its acts: when we perceive our acts, we perceive ourselves as agents—as directly as possible. This is an important insight, which Cory leverages to distinguish Aquinas’s self from Descartes’s bare self and Hume’s imperceptible self.

Chapter 5 turns to habitual self-awareness, the mind’s self-presence preceding all cognitive acts. Despite its Augustinian affinities, Cory argues that habitual self-awareness fits with Aquinas’s larger account. If habitual self-knowledge is the intellect’s “being-equipped-to cognize,” it cannot be exercised without the intellect’s actualization by an extramental object. Chapter 6 then teases out a crucial distinction between implicit and explicit self-awareness. In cognizing any extramental object I am implicitly self-aware, but I can shift my attention explicitly to my thinking. Explicit self-awareness should not, however, be thought of as a “second-order thought piggybacking on a more basic first-order act” (169), but rather as explicitly attending to a thought that already included implicit self-awareness. As such, the intellect “cognize[s] itself from the inside” (206).

The last two chapters turn to the soul’s nature and the question of selfhood. When Aquinas gives special attention to showing that the intellect’s act must be immaterial, Cory hypothesizes that proving intellect’s immateriality is the “clinching step in attaining quidditative self-knowledge” (183). The final chapter attempts to construct Aquinas’s perspective on selfhood from his treatment of self-awareness. Cory usefully removes the objection that we cannot think of ourselves without reducing ourselves to objects; when we think explicitly about ourselves, we always cognize ourselves as also cognizing other objects distinct from us. In explaining...